Burma Cyclone Deaths Part of Our Eco-Footprint

What business does a South Dakota blog have talking about the deaths of thousands in the cyclone in Burma/Myanmar?

Ask my wife. She's all about focusing on local community and local issues. But in her latest post on Prairie Roots, she notes that our own consumerism has stomped our ecological footprint on Burma in a way that increased the death toll from the cyclone. We demand tourism and cheap shrimp; Asian developers clear out coastal mangrove forests; cyclones and tsunamis are able to do that much more damage.

It sounds Rube Goldberg, but that's how the world works: you buy cheap shrimp, more people die in a cyclone. Enjoy your lunch.

So is my wife just another raving tree-hugger trying to destroy America? Come on, you folks know better than that:

Do I say all this to make us feel guilty? No, not really. Mostly it’s to expose more of us to information that I hope will inspire us, mature us to consider how our ways of life affect others. As a Christian who takes her theology seriously, that’s tremendously important to me. One of the questions I’m called by God to ask on a daily basis is, “How does this affect my neighbor?” [Erin Heidelberger, "Others Are What We Eat," Prairie Roots, 2008.05.08].

That's my wife, always thinking about her theology and choosing information over ignorance. (She's another one of those intellectuals... another reason there's a ring on my finger.)

But Erin's not just griping. She tells us what we, the United States, the wealthiest and most influential nation in the world, can and should do. Erin says we can "share more of our wealth with thoe who needlessly suffer," a radical notion that she offers not from Marx but from those other well-known radicals, the ELCA. Erin also points us toward an organization that helps restore mangrove forests.

Read the whole post here... preferably over lunch, so you can think about what you're eating and where it came from.

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And just a conversation starter for you foreign policy hawks: with the Burma junta seizing U.N. aid and refusing to let the U.S. send more than one cargo plane to help the cyclone victims, is it time for a humanitarian invasion (and is that term an oxymoron)?